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It is a principle with us that one who has attained to the
vision of the Intellectual Beauty and grasped the beauty of the
Authentic Intellect will be able also to come to understand the
Father and Transcendent of that Divine Being. It concerns us,
then, to try to see and say, for ourselves and as far as such
matters may be told, how the Beauty of the divine Intellect and
of the Intellectual Kosmos may be revealed to contemplation.
Let us go to the realm of magnitudes: Suppose two blocks of stone
lying side by side: one is unpatterned, quite untouched by art;
the other has been minutely wrought by the craftsman's hands into
some statue of god or man, a Grace or a Muse, or if a human
being, not a portrait but a creation in which the sculptor's art
has concentrated all loveliness.
Now it must be seen that the stone thus brought under the
artist's hand to the beauty of form is beautiful not as stone-
for so the crude block would be as pleasant- but in virtue of the
form or idea introduced by the art. This form is not in the
material; it is in the designer before ever it enters the stone;
and the artificer holds it not by his equipment of eyes and hands
but by his participation in his art. The beauty, therefore,
exists in a far higher state in the art; for it does not come
over integrally into the work; that original beauty is not
transferred; what comes over is a derivative and a minor: and
even that shows itself upon the statue not integrally and with
entire realization of intention but only in so far as it has
subdued the resistance of the material.
Art, then, creating in the image of its own nature and content,
and working by the Idea or Reason-Principle of the beautiful
object it is to produce, must itself be beautiful in a far higher
and purer degree since it is the seat and source of that beauty,
indwelling in the art, which must naturally be more complete than
any comeliness of the external. In the degree in which the beauty
is diffused by entering into matter, it is so much the weaker
than that concentrated in unity; everything that reaches outwards
is the less for it, strength less strong, heat less hot, every
power less potent, and so beauty less beautiful.
Then again every prime cause must be, within itself, more
powerful than its effect can be: the musical does not derive from
an unmusical source but from music; and so the art exhibited in
the material work derives from an art yet higher.
Still the arts are not to be slighted on the ground that they
create by imitation of natural objects; for, to begin with, these
natural objects are themselves imitations; then, we must
recognise that they give no bare reproduction of the thing seen
but go back to the Ideas from which Nature itself derives, and,
furthermore, that much of their work is all their own; they are
holders of beauty and add where nature is lacking. Thus Pheidias
wrought the Zeus upon no model among things of sense but by
apprehending what form Zeus must take if he chose to become
manifest to sight.
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